Monday, March 31, 2014

I'm petitioning the White House to consider revising the method for counting oiled wildlife. The Consolidated Wildlife Reports issued after the BP spill include ONLY wildlife that was physically retrieved, either dead or still alive to be brought to rehab facilities. This did not give any clear picture of the huge numbers of wildlife that were not collected. The total number provided on the Consolidated Wildlife Report ended up with fewer than 8,000 birds--yet did not include ANY of the nesting birds on Raccoon Island. Of the 10,000 adults on the island, scientists estimated that 50–80 percent had been oiled, destroying the chances of most of the eggs and young. Counting just this one colony would easily have doubled the total, but none were counted on this or other nesting colonies in the Gulf, presumably because collecting these birds for rehab would have "compromised nesting success." Please sign my petition to the White House! You will have to "register for an account," because they will only consider petitions signed by 100,000 unique people, so need to verify that you're a real person who will answer the email they send back to you confirming your email address. It's easy to opt out of any additional emails.

Saturday, March 29, 2014

A good field guide is essential equipment for any birder/birdwatcher. In a lot of ways, it’s like a spouse: it can make your life much lovelier and richer, but once you have a good one,
you don’t need another. And the more time you spend together, and the more intimately you get to know it, the more
rewarding your relationship will be. Of course, bird taxonomy changes and exotic
species get established and heavily used field guides eventually do fall apart,
so you may want to occasionally get a new one. And if you want to become truly expert on any group--raptors, shorebirds, gulls, pelagic species, hummingbirds, warblers, etc., you'll want the specialized reference guide to that specific group—no human could possibly be truly authoritative about every single group of birds. But as long as your field
guide can help you to accurately identify virtually every bird you encounter in day-to-day birding, there's no good reason to be playing the field.

Yet I myself have over 20 field guides just to North
American birds, not counting the electronic versions.My budget is extremely tight this year, but
when the new Sibley Guide to Birds came
out, I somehow needed to have it. I
have no idea why I have this compulsion, but there you have it. I was not given a free review copy--I paid for mine.

So what do I think of it? I’m not nearly as big a fan of the
original Sibley guide as many birders. My friend, the wonderful bird guide Erik
Bruhnke, carries his everywhere when he’s guiding bird tours—David Sibley is
one of the top bird identification authorities in the country, and he
illustrates more plumages for most species than any other guide. My first edition copy is a first printing, and
I was disappointed with the colors, which seem washed out. When I saw several
of his original paintings for the book at the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum
in Wausau a few years ago, I was blown away by the perfection of the colors,
and subsequent printings of the first edition made them closer to those splendid originals.

Sibley, like Roger Tory Peterson, draws patternistic birds, all in similar poses mostly in profile, against a white
background. I prefer the National Geographic guide and its predecessor, the
Golden Guide, because they show birds in a variety of more life-like poses,
with more natural backgrounds giving visual hints about behavior and habitat, but
I know others prefer straightforward comparisons of the identifying plumage
characteristics. This is a matter of personal preference.

The colors are much more intense in Sibley’s new edition,
and for the most part I like them better. I did notice that they seem duller and darker in dim rooms than in bright light, but that's probably a good thing for actual field use. He’s added more than 600 new
illustrations, included 111 rare species that weren't in the first edition, and added more written information as
well, and many of the pages include less white space and larger drawings. These
are all significant improvements. I would have expected gull watchers to be especially
pleased—the new Sibley includes 26 color illustrations of the Herring Gull
alone, doubling the number of drawings and giving that one species a 2-page
spread. I’m not at all an expert on gull identification, so have no way of
evaluating those specific pages beyond that.

My technique in
evaluating a field guide is to look up the species I am most familiar with to
see how they look to me. By this measure, the new one seems better than the
first edition with regard to many species, but unfortunately, NO field guide,
including the new Sibley, shows an important plumage of one of my favorite
birds on the planet, the Black-capped Vireo. In this critically endangered
species, males do not molt into full adult plumage until their third year.
Year-old males sing, hold territories, and breed with any females who can’t
compete for a fully adult mate.

Year-old ("second year") male Black-capped Vireo

Being able to age birds in the field is useful
for many reasons, and so it is disappointing to me that even the guide
considered most comprehensive left this important plumage out. And his drawing
of a first-winter female isn’t quite accurate, giving her a white rather than
buff eye ring and making her breast more yellowish than buff. I’ve only spent
about 7 days with Black-capped Vireos in my entire life, so I’m hardly an
authority, but I did get Joe Grzybowski’s take on this, too—he’s been studying
the species since the 70s. But again, no other field guide gets this rare bird
quite right either.

The deal breaker for me about the new Sibley—the thing that
would prevent me from buying it as my primary field guide—has nothing to do
with the bird portrayals at all, but with the font size, color, and typeface. For
some reason, the book’s designers went with a sans serif font for the main text
blocks, even though studies show paragraphs are much easier to read in serif
fonts. Even worse, the font is gray rather than black, and too narrow or small
for me to read without a magnifying glass. My eyes are 62 years old. I showed
it to my husband, whose eyes are a few months older than mine, and he just said
something to the effect of “holy crap!” and handed it back. But my 28-year-old
son didn’t see a problem at all. So I’d recommend that you pick up a copy and
see if you can read it before buying it. (Ironically, this very blog suffers the same problem. I don't know how to adjust it via blogger, and have to set my browser settings to enlarge most web pages to read them. Sadly, one cannot do this with an actual book.)

Again, no field guide is perfect. Like spouses, there are flaws
in every one. My advice? Pick the one whose flaws are least objectionable to
you and stick with it. Then go birding.

(Sibley's electronic version of his field guide is, in my opinion, the very best out there. The Nat Geo one is almost as good--both provide all the information in the field guide, plus vocalizations, but Sibley's makes it easier to look up birds in the first place. His electronic version will be available later this year. I'm sure I'll be buying that too. I have to face it—I'm addicted. Fortunately, I haven't been so fickle where my real spouse is concerned.)

Monday, March 24, 2014

Thick, tarry bunker fuel is extremely difficult to clean up.
Photo taken March 23, 2014 by NBC Bay Area News

On March 22, 2014, a cargo ship collided
with a barge, and at least one tank filled with 4,000 barrels, or 168,000 gallons, of fuel oil spilled into a
53 mile long shipping channel between Galveston Bay and the Gulf of Mexico—a
channel bordered on both sides by prime migratory bird resting and nesting
habitat. And this wasn’t just any fuel oil—it was bunker fuel—the thick, tarry,
extremely toxic sludge left over after gasoline, motor oil, propane, and other
products have been refined out of crude oil. Also called marine fuel oil, this
is the stuff that powers container ships from China lugging all the cheap
merchandise Americans so voraciously consume.

Hard as it is to believe up here in the frozen Northland,
spring has already begun in Texas, with migrants crossing the Gulf and many
species starting to nest. Bolivar Flats Shorebird Sanctuary, which attracts
50,000 to 70,000 migratory shorebirds to its perfect foraging habitat, lies just
to the east of the spill. Richard Gibbons, conservation director for HoustonAudubon, told ABC News that “the timing really couldn't be much worse since
we're approaching the peak shorebird migration season," and added that
tens of thousands of wintering birds also remain in the area.

Oil floats, so thick rolls of floating plastic or absorbent
material called boom ostensibly prevent oil from floating beyond it, as long
as the boom stays in place and the water is relatively calm. After the BP
spill, this kind of boom was supposed to protect breeding islands, but it never
occurred to the powers-that-be to anchor it and, like anything that floats, the boom washed ashore right along with the oil. When I was in Barataria Bay after that
spill, we saw their too-late effort to anchor boom after the islands had
already been oiled.

Things apparently haven’t improved since then—this
weekend’s fog and rain, along with currents, the tide, and wind, made
containment impossible, and oiled birds are already being found.

It hurts to see, over and over, this kind of disaster. This
spill doesn’t involve nearly as much oil as the Exxon Valdez or the 2010 BP oil
spill, and many people and news outlets only seem to consider record-breaking
stories worth paying attention to, despite the many tens of thousands of birds
in the oiled area right now and the uniquely dangerous properties of bunker fuel.

What is most infuriating to me is that in 2010, BP
managed to set a new precedent in how oiled wildlife is counted--playing a form of Calvinball by changing the rules about which animals can be tallied. After the
Exxon Valdez spill, every oil-covered bird, mammal, and other animal seen by
responders was counted, whether or not it could be rescued or its carcass
salvaged. But in 2010, BP somehow persuaded the government and environmental groups to let
them limit the official count to animals that were actually picked up, dead or
alive, making the total at least an order of magnitude less than the number of
oiled wildlife seen by reputable observers. To skew the numbers even more to their
advantage, BP also managed to get the government to limit the birds picked up
to those completely incapable of flight. I was on a boat in Barataria Bay along
Cat Island when we came upon a severely oiled Black-crowned Night-Heron.

Our
boat spooked the poor thing, and it fluttered at most a foot or two from the
boom into the water and struggled onto the island, but even though we could
easily have captured it to bring it to a rehab facility, the boat captain could
not permit it. He told us that he would lose his license for retrieving a bird that
could still fly, and by BP’s definition, that was flight.

Due to their excessively restrictive rules, only about 9,000
oiled birds were physically collected, and so tallied, after the BP spill. And to skew the count even further, somebody in power decided to prohibit anyone from collecting dead or badly oiled birds from any of the nesting colonies, too. Not one of the 10,000 adult
birds nesting at the breeding colony on Raccoon Island is included in the official count, nor any of their young, even though scientists observing that colony determined that between 50 and 80 percent of those birds were oiled. The US Fish and Wildlife Service and even Audubon claimed that entering the colony to help save birds or retrieve dead ones might compromise the ability of any birds in the colony to nest successfully, but didn't seem to notice that this kept thousands of fatally oiled birds off the official tally. They also didn't seem to realize that people had been allowed to photograph and make movies of nesting birds on this island many times, but suddenly were being shooed away. No
birds were counted in any other affected breeding colonies, either.

Despite BP being allowed to count oiled birds by such a
completely different method to minimize the total, many sources still use their 4-digit
total in comparison with the 100,000–250,000 birds oiled after the
Exxon Valdez. It’s bad enough that corporations are so badly polluting our
world—the least they can do is let us get a clean estimate of their
destruction.

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

I don’t know if it’s because our culture is so very
youth-oriented, but most movies about adolescents set up at least one adult,
and often most of them, to be clueless and unsympathetic. It’s as
if adult writers see adolescence through a nostalgic glow and adulthood through an unforgiving lens that magnifies every flaw. Adults seem to be the main obstruction blocking youth from realizing their dreams and potential. In most coming-of-age movies, at
least one parent figure is portrayed as utterly wrong-headed—the one who in
the end finally figures out just how wonderful the poor, misunderstood kid was
or, in the case of something like Romeo
and Juliet or Dead Poets Society,
tragically never does until it’s too late. Some coming-of-age films, such as Stand by Me, are very dark, painting the adult world as inescapably grim--youthful characters who get out of these movies alive are left disillusioned for life. Others, like Breaking Away, are peopled with disillusioned adults, some who damaged their children a lot, but somehow give the main characters, adults and youth, hope that life may still hold for them meaning and even joy.

A quietly lovely new movie by Rob Meyer, A Birder’s Guide to Everything, places much more nuanced and realistic
youth and adults in a gentle tale of love and loss. This coming of age story rings utterly true. The
movie takes place a year and a half after the mother of the main character,
David (Kodi Smit-McPhee), has died. David and his father (James Le Gros) are so locked in their individual grief
that neither has much understanding of the other’s pain. Now David’s father is
about to marry the woman who had been his wife’s nurse. Who better than she can fully understand how much he's lost or can fully appreciate his grief and what he's suffered? His conscience is
clear—they never got together until after his wife had died—but he has no clue
that his son doesn’t realize that. And his son has no clue of the dimensions of
his father’s grief.

David is absorbed with birds with the monomaniacal focus we geeks always seem to fixate on our passions, but he and his two best
friends, who form the Young Birders Society at his high school, are not
stereotypical geeks nor archetypes—they’re just three individual boys on the
cusp of adulthood, joined by a shared fascination with birds. And the three young actors who play them are superb. They’ve
developed all kinds of wonderfully specific geeky rituals that the movie wisely
doesn’t explain—at some point they’d decided to follow Robert’s Rules of Order, and even in normal conversation, they switch
over to it to resolve disputes. Peter (Michael Chen), the quietly assertive leader of the group, is the
chairman of the club, and whenever the boys disagree, he calls for a vote. They
speak in Latin whenever they don’t want to be understood by
outsiders. The third member is Timmy (Alex Wolff), who is obsessed with sex and clueless
about girls. This role could have been played for laughs and mere comic relief—a throwaway character to contrast with David as a sensitive soul—but the movie doesn’t reduce any of the characters to easy clichés—Timmy's vulnerability makes him no less obnoxious, and his obnoxiousness makes him no
less sweet and sensitive in his own right.

The Young Birders Society had had two other members—a girl who quit just before the movie starts, put off by Timmy’s insufferable sexual
harassment (he kept calling her a Tufted Titmouse) and a boy who quits at
the movie’s start because the girl left—Timmy scolds him that the birding club isn't a dating service. Now suddenly down to three members, the
club’s existence is in jeopardy because the school requires officially
recognized organizations to have a minimum membership of four.

At the start of the movie, David sees
and takes an out-of-focus photo of what looks to him to be an odd duck. He
brings the photo to the club to see if they want to help him try to relocate
it. They vote against it, but by the next morning, studying his photo and what
he remembers of the duck before it took off, David has researched the
possibilities and concluded that it seems to be not just a rare species, but a
Labrador Duck, a “Lazarus Species”—a bird considered extinct so, if verified, would be "brought back from the dead," so to speak. The three decide to consult an actual expert—Dr. Lawrence Konrad, an
ornithologist played by Ben Kingsley.
Konrad is a wonderfully developed character—world-weary author of a book
titled Look to the Skies, who was a
close associate of David’s mother and famous for his own controversial discovery
of another Lazarus species, an Ivory-billed Woodpecker in 2005. The movie
makes no bones about the fact that he couldn’t verify that sighting and that many ornithologists don't believe it. Konrad
lost a leg in a long-ago accident while searching for a rare bird in the tropics, and
lost his drivers license when he mistook a police car chasing him for an albino nighthawk—points he makes when he warns David not to consider him
a role model.

Konrad agrees that although the photo is poor, it does
support the possibility of a Labrador Duck. He points out on a map where he
thinks a sea duck might be likely to be heading at this point in migration, and
they pick a large lake in Connecticut as a reasonable place to search. Konrad emphasizes
that the boys need a longer camera lens if they hope to get any sighting of it taken
seriously. To accomplish this, David “borrows” a long lens from the school, and
Ellen (Katie Chang), the girl who gave him the key to where it was stored, comes to his house
to get it back. The boys are desperate and end up letting her tag along to
photograph the bird. She has never birded before, and so naturally displays a
certain bemusement about some bird names and confusion about how the boys know
what each species is, but the movie plays this just right, never once working
for a cheap laugh. She is sucked into watching the birds with exactly the
kind of growing wonder I so often see in non-birders who for one reason or
another end up on a birding jaunt.

I was very pleased with Ellen's character. She's just as geeky as the boys, with skills and expertise their little circle desperately needs, and when it becomes necessary, she jumps right in to speak Latin with them—the perfect way of establishing that she genuinely belongs in this insular little group. As a shy, geeky woman myself, one who had to work my own way into insular male birding cliques in my 20s and 30s, I particularly relished Ellen's role and Chang's performance. As a fully realized character, Ellen has a quiet dignity, intelligence, and her own longings and bewildering challenges. There are all kinds of tests nowadays to determine whether a movie shows gender bias, but the characterizations of both males and females (including David's dead mother) are so precise and nuanced that this film transcends the need for tests about stereotyping. The female roles are as robust as the male roles, David's dead mother and Konrad holding equal standing as the most admirable birders, and Ellen working her way into equal standing with the boys in terms of the Young Birders Society in an organic, human way rather than any kind of cliche'd or patronizing way. The movie is too quiet and realistic to pretend Timmy can undergo any kind of sea change in terms of his own sexism, but the movie paints that element of him in a very negative light even as Ellen rolls her eyes and ignores it—something girls and women in male-dominated fields learn to do even as we see clearly what jerks some individual men can be. Timmy does figure out that Ellen is a valuable part of the group and maybe, just maybe, he'll grow to start seeing other girls as human beings rather than sexual challenges to overcome.

Kenn Kaufman served as an ornithological consultant for the film and has a brief cameo—he has no lines, but plays an essential part in a lovely and pivotal moment. I love how the movie so seamlessly integrates appropriate bird songs in the background, and how the characters identify many of them but leave some unnoticed or unidentified. While they're camping, a Great Horned Owl hoots and Peter calls out the identification (and hey--it doesn't portend a death!!), but then a screech owl trills while they're in the middle of talking and no one notices. That made the scene the following morning somehow lovelier for me, when David discovers a beautiful red-morph Eastern Screech-Owl perched on a branch. And it was especially cool for me to see how elegantly a world-class birder like Kenn Kaufman can work magic with little moments in subtle ways that 99 percent of viewers may never notice at all, but ring wonderfully true for those of us in the know. Kingley's Konrad had lost his leg searching for a Pale-headed Brush-Finch in Ecuador. There was not a single sighting of the Pale-headed Brush-Finch between 1969 and 1998, making it a delightfully subtle and apt choice in a movie about a "Lazarus species." Indeed, the paper in the journal Cotinga [11 (1999): 50–54] about the species' rediscovery in 1998 is titled, "Pale-headed Brush-Finch Atlapetes pallidiceps is not extinct."

Two dead birds figure prominently in the movie, but they’re
not forced into a symbolic or precious movie cliché. I particularly enjoyed the brief flashback scenes when David remembers birding with his mom--the hazy in and out flickerings were lovely and evocative without overdoing it. And the plot was simple, pulling the movie forward without becoming predictable. It was almost to be expected that competitors
for the rare sighting would roar into the scene, but even with them (two only somewhat obnoxious birders in the extreme listing category), the movie
reached its realistic climax and dénouement in a
quietly organic way specific to its wonderfully fleshed-out characters. I was a little surprised that Konrad didn't instantly recognize one bird, but that seemed like the only birding flaw in the entire movie, and a very minor one at that.

As a birder, it’s cosmically satisfying to see a
movie that is so spot-on about the vocabulary and feeling of birding. As a
mother and a former teacher, it is wonderful to see a coming of age movie about
realistic kids and adults. A Birder’s
Guide to Everything holds together as a splendid movie for a general audience while honoring all the subtleties that the pickiest of birders could ask for.

The film has been released on iTunes (where I bought my copy), Amazon streaming,
and various On Demand movie channels, and will soon be showing in some
theaters. I hope Duluth’s Zinema shows it. This is a wiser and far more universal
film than The Big Year was, as its
second place audience award at the Tribeca Film Festival would attest. I give
it two wings up.

Monday, March 10, 2014

Last week, I opened my email to discover one of the most
fascinating photos I’ve ever seen, from a friend in Port Wing, Wisconsin.
Eileen Bentzen writes,

On the morning of March 2, 2014, in
this longest and harshest of cold winters on record, I glanced out my window
and saw a black “lump” on the side of one of the trees in my yard, which piqued
my curiosity. Even with binoculars it was too far away to see anything but the
fact it was black, shaped like a bird with a flare of red at the top. There was
a vicious wind, and I could see what looked like feathers fluttering.

I had to see what it was – maybe a
bird in distress, freezing, injured – so I slipped on my boots and coat,
grabbed my camera and went for it. The snow was up to my waist, and immediately
my boots were full of snow and my legs aching, but I got to the tree and took
one photo, afraid it would scare the bird, but he didn’t move. He was gripping
the tree with his feet, and soft downy, feathers, gray with tips of white,
moved in the wind, his gloriously red crowned head tucked. He was directly in
the sun, about a foot above the snow line, and as out of the wind as he could
be. I put the camera in my pocket and reached out my mittened hands to touch
the bird on both sides. As my hands touched him, his wings FLEW apart, his head
jerked up and he instantly flew away. It was a huge male pileated woodpecker. When
I startled him, which I am very sorry for, his wing span was awesome – and his
movements so quick it was difficult to register. At least he wasn’t hurt, and
he was able to get himself back into the woods safely.

I’ve never seen anything like Eileen’s photo. The bird was
perched on the trunk, wings down in the normal position, obscuring all but the
tips of the tail, and the soft down feathers of the back and sides were
entirely erect, protruding through what we call the contour feathers of the back, providing maximum insulation. The sun
was shining directly on the bird, and out of the wind where he was, he may have
been warmer in the sun than he would have been within a cavity of a frozen
tree. It’s very easy for woodpeckers to rest in a vertical posture—their claws
cling effortlessly to the trunk, their body also braced by their tail feathers.
When I was a licensed wildlife rehabber, I once took care of a fledgling
Pileated Woodpecker for a few weeks, and he slept on a nice thick chunk of wood
in this same posture, except it was summer, so my young bird didn’t erect his
down in the same fluffy way.

Seeing a sleeping Pileated Woodpecker in captivity is no big
deal, if you happen to have one handy. But discovering one in the wild is
something else! I was thrilled that Eileen sent me the story and her amazing photo.